


Lucidity

by ToxicPineapple



Series: Femslash February 2020 [9]
Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, Super Dangan Ronpa 2
Genre: (That's the prompt), (in Akane's past), (it's not very explicit and it only happens once but it's there), Brief Allusion To Sexual Abuse, Canon Compliant, Conversations, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, F/F, Femslash February, Hurt/Comfort, Light Angst, Light Hurt/Comfort, Nightmares, Ocean, Post canon, Post-Game, implied established relationship, post-tragedy, they are healing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-09
Updated: 2020-02-09
Packaged: 2021-02-27 20:28:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,883
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22531726
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ToxicPineapple/pseuds/ToxicPineapple
Summary: “Probably gonna rain,” she remarks, scratching the back of her neck. Her brown hair is as unruly as ever, but it’s short now. Ibuki offered to give them all haircuts, displaying a certain skill with scissors, but Sonia knows that Akane shears off her hair with a knife. When she asked, once, the other woman shrugged and said, makes me feel more in control. Which Sonia understands. It is perhaps the reason she’s sitting here with her feet in the ocean. “You’re gonna catch cold.”“You don’t catch the cold from being in the cold,” Sonia corrects. “It lowers your immune system, yes, but the illness itself doesn’t come from--”“A’right, I get the point,” concedes Akane, raising her hands up in surrender. Sonia can’t help smiling.---Sonia tries to find ways to ground herself, and Akane assists.
Relationships: Sonia Nevermind/Owari Akane
Series: Femslash February 2020 [9]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1616182
Comments: 10
Kudos: 45





	Lucidity

**Author's Note:**

> written for femslash february day nine! the prompt is "ocean"

The morning is grey, chilly and overcast, but Sonia’s feet are bare. She wiggles her toes in the freezing wet sand as choppy, murky waves splash over them. They’re awfully numb by now, cold and stiff, but she doesn’t make any effort to shift away. Nor does she fret over the undoubted pinkness of her nose, her ears. The way her fingers lock up before closing entirely, stuck at a ninety degree angle. This is the most cold it ever gets on Jabberwock Island, cloudy and threatening rain, but after years here, Sonia has gotten used to the warmth. Still, she sits here without a jacket, the pretty white skirt Ibuki sewed for her stained with the seaweed, and the wetness of the sand.

“You’re going to get hypothermia,” Akane’s rough voice comes from behind her, and Sonia doesn’t pretend surprise; she heard the shifting of the sand beneath Akane’s feet as she walked over, the wet  _ pad pad pad  _ when she reached the parts of the sand that have recently been hit by the tides. It’s low tide right now, and Sonia is sitting amidst seaweed and little crabs. Somewhere off to her right, there’s a sea cucumber. She poked it when she arrived but hasn’t looked at it since. “Or frostbite.”

“Mikan will tend to me,” Sonia replies airily. She doesn’t really care all that much, and Akane must understand this, because she drops to sit down, ever so gracefully, at Sonia’s side. She doesn’t spread out her legs, though, she crosses them, feet digging into the wet sand but not touching the water. Her stormy grey eyes, so much like the clouds above their head, turn up to the sky.

“Probably gonna rain,” she remarks, scratching the back of her neck. Her brown hair is as unruly as ever, but it’s short now. Ibuki offered to give them all haircuts, displaying a certain skill with scissors, but Sonia knows that Akane shears off her hair with a knife. When she asked, once, the other woman shrugged and said,  _ makes me feel more in control.  _ Which Sonia understands. It is perhaps the reason she’s sitting here with her feet in the ocean. “You’re gonna catch cold.”

“You don’t catch the cold from being in the cold,” Sonia corrects. “It lowers your immune system, yes, but the illness itself doesn’t come from--”

  
“A’right, I get the point,” concedes Akane, raising her hands up in surrender. Sonia can’t help smiling. “I’m just sayin’, there’s only fifteen of us around here. Illnesses are gonna go through us like clockwork.”

  
“And Mikan will be more than happy to rise to the occasion.” Sonia smiles, and Akane lets out a bemused chuckle, her gaze flickering over Sonia’s face. The smile fades underneath the weight of her gaze, and Sonia averts her eyes; Akane’s gaze can be empty at times, light and meaningless, but there are other times, like right now, where she is ridiculously perceptive. And in these times it weighs so, so much.

Softly, Akane says, “Nightmares were bad, huh?’

“Sure,” Sonia shoves out, but she can’t remove the edge from her voice. She doesn’t like talking about it. Some weird part of her feels inclined to rise above her station, so to speak, be a leader figure on this island, show no weaknesses. It was her responsibility back before everything, when she was nothing but the princess of the Novoselic. Sonia is hardly a leader among her friends here; that’s always been Chiaki’s responsibility, and now that Chiaki has been gone for years the role falls to Hajime, but the inclination is still there. Anyway, talking about the things that make her feel powerless has never been her favourite.

Akane rubs her hands up and down one of her legs. Despite her chastising Sonia for sitting like this in the cold, she isn’t very well equipped to face the weather either, wearing red shorts and an overlarge t-shirt that might be Nekomaru’s. (They all share clothes. Sonia wouldn’t be surprised if several of the nightshirts in her closet were once Gundham’s. Not that it means anything, though, because there’s only one person on this island who has her heart, and it’s not the breeder.) “You don’t talk much about them when they happen,” she points out, arbitrarily.

“No,” Sonia says, and tries not to sound peeved, because Akane is simply saying what she thinks. It’s what she’s always done, her manner, so to speak, and Sonia’s favourite thing about her. Just mildly inconvenient when she’s the topic of conversation. “It’s better if I don’t.” Easier to deal with. More manageable. Puts her in the position to actually fall asleep again after. The water is still as chilly as before but against her feet it has begun to feel warm, and Sonia stares at it, wondering if this is a bad thing.

“Maybe for a while,” Akane’s voice is uncharacteristically distant where Sonia has learned to expect bluntness. “But it just gets worse the longer you ignore it. At least, that’s how things work with my nightmares.”

And Akane has nightmares, too, they all do. Sonia’s are quiet; she wakes up sweaty and silent in the middle of the night, her heart racing and her palms stinging from her fingernails digging into them for so long. Her molars ache when she lifts them from how hard she was gnashing them and her head pounds and swims with images that she can’t forget, no matter how hard she tries. But Akane’s, Sonia knows, are loud and violent. She thrashes, tangles herself in her blankets, and throws herself off the side of the bed, kicking out and stubbing her toes on the bedframe. When she wakes up the danger isn’t yet forgotten, and sometimes she lashes out, and then she has the guilt to deal with too, the guilt of hurting someone else, alongside her own pain and the lingering terror from whatever it was she was reliving.

Sonia has been in Akane’s room for a few of these nightmares, but not many, and not nearly often enough to know what they’re about. Nobody does, really, because nobody wants to talk about it. Sometimes Sonia walks into a room and Hajime and Nagito are fit together like puzzle pieces, whispering things that Sonia can’t understand, or otherwise it’s Mahiru and Hiyoko, wrapped in each other’s arms, but nothing is discussed at large. And as many times as Sonia has woken up in the middle of the night to Gundham outside of her door, tears streaming down his face, she really doesn’t have the strength to ask for details.

Still, in this moment she can’t help asking, “You talk about them?”

“Sometimes.” Akane is casual, airy. Her words are throwaway words, and Sonia can tell that they are of little importance to her. It is how Akane copes, but it’s not a lie. She turns off her ability to care about her trauma so that it can’t hurt her anymore. It’s why she’s so flippant about the things that she shouldn’t be, the tragedy, the killing game-- and before that, too, the faceless men in her past who Sonia knows affected her worse than she lets on. When she’s asleep she can’t do that though, can’t press the button and turn on apathy, can’t disassociate in the way she does so frequently in order to survive. She’s defenseless in her dreams. “Not always to another person. I mean, you or Nekomaru are always here if I need you,” she says, giving Sonia a sideways look. “But usually I talk about them to myself. Out loud. Y’know. If a room is empty or if everyone else is asleep. I just talk to myself.”

“It helps?” Sonia asks with her eyebrows raised. “Wouldn’t that just be reliving everything?”

“Yeah. But when I’m awake, it’s like… I can control the narrative. I can change how I view things. And if I can bring some… fuck, what’s the word,  _ lucidity  _ into it, the nightmares don’t get me as bad.” Akane smiles at her. “It’s not foolproof. Hiyoko’s walked in on me doing it a couple times. She makes fun, but I think she gets it. More than she pretends to, anyway.”

They all have their ways of coping. Sonia gazes out into the choppy waves, imagines yellow sailboats bobbing along out there, tipping from side to side in the wind. But nobody comes around here anymore except for Makoto Naegi and the other Future Foundation members. His friends. People trying to rehabilitate. There will be no sailboats. And especially not on a day like today. “I get caught up in my head too much for that to be effective for me,” murmurs Sonia. “I think I would probably just get everything even more muddled.”

“Then talk to me.” Akane shrugs. “It’s not like there’s much I don’t know about you, princess.”

“Well,” Sonia hesitates. “It isn’t always linear.”

“Are nightmares ever?” Akane’s grin is crooked. “Tell me bits and pieces. Colours and shit. Whatever you want, whenever you want. You don’t have to ask. I’m always listening if it’s you.”

There is a heavy pause, and Sonia slumps under the weight of it, suddenly feeling very very cold. She opens and closes her mouth a few times, contemplating the right words to use to express her gratitude, but then above their heads, there is a crack of thunder, and the clouds split open. Rain begins to pour down on them. She curls her legs into her chest.

“Yikes,” mutters Akane. “Uh, wanna relocate?”

“Yes,” Sonia breathes out, catching raindrops in the palm of her hand. They taste sweet when she brings it to her mouth. “That would be nice.”

“A’ight,” Akane grunts, getting to her feet, and before Sonia can follow suit, she reaches out and takes Sonia into her arms, picking her up bridal style. As though she were a princess. (Ha, ha.) Sonia lets out a small sound of surprise and wraps her arms around Akane’s neck, holding tight. “I’m takin’ you back to my cottage, I’ve got some nice fuzzy socks and you can take a shower and get some warmth in your bones. You’re freezing,” she adds, unnecessarily, and her lips, when she presses them against Sonia’s forehead, are warm.

Akane doesn’t wait for confirmation before she turns and starts walking towards the cottages, her heart thrumming slow and strong against Sonia’s side. With nothing else to do, Sonia rests her head against Akane’s shoulder and listens to her breath. She’s so solid. Even when they first woke up from the program, and they were both in pieces over the people who they lost, the people who they loved-- Akane was and has since been so very very solid. It’s something that Sonia takes great comfort in. She closes her eyes and silently prays that this never changes.

“Alright there?” Akane murmurs.

“Mhm.” Sonia pauses. “Always.”

Behind them, the ocean crashes against the shore, waves beating up and down in the distance, churning and bobbing, and a seagull lands on the beach where they were seated, snatching a crab from a pocket in the sand and flying off again, a couple claw imprints in the wet sand the only indication it was ever there in the first place.

**Author's Note:**

> this one is kinda heavier than the other ones ngl. i absolutely detest the way that the game shoved aside the fact that akane is a sexual abuse survivor and treated her as a stupid fanservice character when she's clearly more complex than that
> 
> but okay!!! go off and be nasty, danganronpa
> 
> anyway :3 i'm VIBING with this pairing they're so excellent
> 
> and i know this one is like....... longer than the others but i got excited. it happens. it will happen again. i don't have any semblance of self restraint and i have nothing to do today but write femslash february
> 
> (it's still february second for me by the way, but you'll be seeing this next sunday so that's kinda wild)
> 
> hope you liked anyway bye


End file.
